The Royalty Scam — LAST week at South by Southwest, the rock music conference held every year in Austin, Tex., the talk in hotel lobbies, coffeeshops and the convention center was dominated by one issue: how do musicians make a living in the age of the Internet?

Meanwhile, back at the plantation — Bebo founders Michael and Xochi Birch are the latest Web 2.0 entrepreneurs to cash in on user-generated content. A little over a week ago, the Birches sold Bebo, the third largest social network, to AOL for $850 million, about $600 million …

Are these the first screenshots of the iPhone AppStore? — One of our readers sent us in some screenshots of his iPhone showing what appears to be the anticipated iTunes AppStore. Could these pictures be the AppStore, or could it be some type of hack? It definitely looks legit to us!

Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking — Left, I.B.M. employees with a z10 mainframe, part of the latest generation of the computers and designed for new tasks. Right, an older iteration of the mainframe, I.B.M.'s System/360. In the 1960s, it introduced technology still in use today.

Bridging Desktop And Web Applications - A Look At Mozilla Prism — New platforms like Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism are evolving that combine the benefits of Internet flow with the flexibility and power of desktop applications. They are part browser, part desktop app and are extremely efficient for certain types of applications.

Yellow Drum Machine — There is always more fun to do with this robot, but for now I will just mark it “complete” in the current version, hope you enjoy it. — Notice how the robot first plays on the object it finds (or is forced to find by the angry cameraman), plays a small beat, and records the beat it plays on it.

At Megastores, Hagglers Find Prices Are Flexible — SAN FRANCISCO — Shoppers are discovering an upside to the down economy. They are getting price breaks by reviving an age-old retail strategy: haggling. — A bargaining culture once confined largely to car showrooms and jewelry stores …

Today's Whiny MacMeme Is... ...Apple is a bad “Windows citizen” because they “sneakily” “forced” Safari 3.1 on unsuspecting Windows iTunes users. Apparently some of the whiny twats in the blogokleinbottle are up in arms that Apple offered up Safari 3.1 for Windows in the Software Update tool …

Hazards of Wifi — Our town, Sebastopol, had passed a resolution in November to permit a local Internet provider to provide public wireless access. This week, fourteen people showed up at a City Council meeting to make the claim that wireless caused health problems in general and to them specifically.

Video: Sharing The JoyEngine Community Story — I was walking down the street in Boulder, Colorado earlier this month and was intrigued by a storefront symbol. I looked into the storefront windows and my eyes were met with colorful graffiti-like artwork, handmade toys and lots of tees.

Paul Graham's Participatory Narcissism — I have tremendous respect for Paul Graham. His essays— repackaged in the book Hackers and Painters— are among the best writing I've found on software engineering. Not all of them are so great, of course, but the majority are well worth your time.